Privacy lives: Their Take

June 28, 2014|Chicago Tribune

Privacy gets reprieve

Is privacy dead? If so, someone forgot to tell the Supreme Court.

In a ringing unanimous decision Wednesday, the justices said that when police arrest a suspect, they don't have the right to access the data in his cellphone without a search warrant. It's a critical victory for the right of citizens to shield their most private information from government scrutiny.…

Smartphones may carry a digital record not just of calls made but of medical concerns, political preferences, romantic involvements, music tastes, sexual predilections, financial resources, travels and more. They could also provide evidence of crimes committed.

Once an arrest occurs, the suspect certainly has lesser privacy rights than before.…But even after being taken in, a suspect retains some rights.

Cops normally may not ransack a suspect's house without a warrant. And as the court noted, "a cellphone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house."

In recent years, the court has been consistently sympathetic to the purported needs of law enforcement agencies. In this instance, though, it felt it had no choice but to impose a limit.…

Said the court: "Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cellphone seized incident to arrest is accordingly simple — get a warrant." If they have good reasons to think they'll find evidence of a crime, a judge should be willing to grant it promptly.…